Pentagon’s $547 Million Af-Pak Propaganda Campaign

Pentagon can’t account for $8.57 billion in Iraqi funds

B is for billions. And b is for it’s hard to believe that they’ve done it again. The last time, even more money vanished, which I noted in my article, Following Pentagon trillions to Israel and 9-11. This was under the Zionist Dov Zakheim’s watch as Comptroller of the Pentagon from May 4, 2001, to March 10, 2004.

I wrote in that article, “At that time he was unable to explain the disappearance of $1 trillion dollars. Actually, nearly three years earlier, Donald Rumsfeld announced on September 10, 2001, that an audit discovered $2.3 trillion was also missing from the Pentagon books. That story, as I mentioned, was buried under 9-11’s rubble. The two sums disappeared on Zakheim’s watch.

“Yet on May 6, 2004, Zakheim took a lucrative position at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the most prestigious strategy consulting firms in the world. One of its clients then was Blessed Relief, a charity said to be a front for Osama bin Laden. Booz, Allen & Hamilton then also worked closely with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the research arm of the Department of Defense. So the dark card was shifted to another part of the deck.”

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Pascal Spills It on BP, Sporkin, and the Disaster in the Gulf

Jeanne Pascal knows BP.

Up until three months ago, when she retired, Jeanne Pascal was an attorney at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Her beat: debarment of BP.

For years, she worked on the BP case.

After all BP’s rap sheet was long and nasty – three convictions, an $84 million OSHA fine, and a deferred prosecution agreement.

Last year, Pascal was inclined to debar BP – strip it of its government contracts – because of its repeat violations.

But the Pentagon intervened.

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The Pentagon’s game plan

OBAMA’S WAR MACHINE

There's more war in America's future - a great deal more, judging by the Barack Obama administration’s reports, pronouncements and actions in recent months.

These documents and deeds include the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), the Ballistic Missile Defense Report, the nuclear security summit in New York and the May 3-28 United Nations nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference, as well as the continuing wars in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the 2011 Pentagon war budget request.

The United States government presides as a military colossus of unrivalled dimension, but the QDR, which was published in February, suggests Washington views America as being constantly under the threat of attack from a multitude of fearsome forces bent on its destruction. As such, trillions more dollars must be invested in present and future wars – ostensibly to make safe the besieged homeland.

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The WikiLeaks Video and Terrorist Blowback

I can’t improve on Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the WikiLeaks video depicting the slaughter of Iraqi citizens. See here and here and here.

However, there is one part of the WikiLeaks video that I wish to address — the reaction of the helicopter pilots upon learning that there were two children who were shot and injured during the melee. Their reaction, in fact, perfectly exemplifies the mindset that has long characterized U.S. officials, including those in the Pentagon.

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Believe It or Not (2010 Imperial Edition)

U.S. War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off

In my 1950s childhood, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: “If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and forever.”  Or if you were young and iconoclastic, you could chuckle over Mad magazine’s parody, “Ripup’s Believe It or Don’t!”

With our Afghan and Iraq wars on my mind, I’ve been wondering whether Ripley’s moment hasn’t returned.  Here, for instance, are some figures offered in a Washington Post piece by Lieutenant General James H. Pillsbury, deputy commanding general of the U.S. Army Materiel Command, who is deeply involved in the “drawdown of the logistics operation in Iraq”:  “There are... more than 341 facilities; 263,000 soldiers, Defense Department civilians and contractor employees; 83,000 containers; 42,000 vehicles; 3 million equipment items; and roughly $54 billion in assets that will ultimately be removed from Iraq.” 

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Joint Strike Fighter Cost Overruns

The Pentagon has informed Congress about another of its procurement projects that is plagued by cost overruns. In other news, the sun will rise and set today, and the pope is Catholic.

Pentagon officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday that costs for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter have jumped more than 50 percent since the program began in 2001. Testifying before the committee, the Government Accountability Office noted that it has reviewed the JSF effort five times and the findings haven’t been positive:

We have consistently reported on the elevated risk of poor program outcomes from the substantial overlap of development, test, and production activities and our concerns about the Government investing in large numbers of production aircraft before variant designs are proven and performance verified in testing.

In our March 2009 report, we again noted development cost increases, additional delays in manufacturing and testing schedules, and the government’s increased financial risk from plans to increase procurement in advance of testing.

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Department of Defense or Department of Money Sucking?

History quiz: Name the greatest robbery committed in the last 100 years.

A: Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme

B: Nazi theft of art treasures from conquered nations

C. Diamonds stolen from Africa by Belgians

D. The Pentagon budget.

This is not a tricky multiple choice question where all the answers could be correct. Only one stands out as the criminal conspiracy of the century, an ongoing fraud perpetrated by tens of thousands of beneficiaries.

Did you get it? Yes, the most fraudulent corrupt scheme ever foisted on humankind is the Pentagon budget. Since 2001, under the guise of defending the country – which the Defense Department has never done – the DOD has scammed from US taxpayers $5.1 trillion. Since its inception, it has never passed an audit and thus not accounted for the money that pours into its coffers.

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Obama 2011: Defense Department

President Barack Obama’s 2011 fiscal budget projection was released Monday for initial debate and eventual approval. There are some obvious winners and losers in purely budgetary terms. Education, small businesses, stimulus projects, air travel, and other areas go extra funding. Big banks, the NASA Moon program, and moves to curtail climate change got less funding.

Usually the “winners” and “losers” in the budget are pretty cut and dry, but one area is always less easily categorized. The Pentagon and Department of Defense saw a 3.4 percent increase in the 2011 fiscal outlook, but it remains to be seen whether this is a good or a bad thing for the U.S.

In this time of financial upheaval and massive fiscal deficits so-called “spend thrift” politicians are clamoring to cut spending in virtually every direction. However very few, including the current Obama administration, seem willing to pull the plug on America’s inflated defense budget.

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The Forty-Year Drone War & The Drone Surge

The Forty-Year Drone War

There’s something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations — poison gas, the early airplane, the tank — barely hit the battlefield before the enemy had developed countermeasures and was cranking up his own production line to create something similar. And this process has never stopped.

The wonder weapon of our present moment is the missile-armed unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone, now doing our dirty work, an endless series of targeted assassinations, in the Afghan-Pakistani borderlands. Such weapons always come with wondrous claims. Here’s a typical one from a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: “Never before in the history of air warfare have we been able to distinguish as well between combatants and civilians as we can with drones.” When it comes to war, beware of any sentence that begins “never before,” and the claims of future breakthroughs or victories that go with them.

It’s easy, of course, for the editorial writers of the Journal to pen such confident sentiments thousands of miles from the war zone. They would undoubtedly feel quite differently if their hometowns and neighborhoods were the targets of such “precise” weaponry, which has nonetheless managed to kill hundreds of civilians.

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